MIT physicists create new form of matter

[Dover]

MIT physicists create new form of matter

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT scientists have brought a supercool end to a heated race among physicists: They have become the first to create a new type of matter, a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity.
Their work, to be reported in the June 23 issue of Nature, is closely related to the superconductivity of electrons in metals. Observations of superfluids may help solve lingering questions about high-temperature superconductivity, which has widespread applications for magnets, sensors and energy-efficient transport of electricity, said Wolfgang Ketterle, a Nobel laureate who heads the MIT group and who is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics.

Seeing the superfluid gas so clearly is such a dramatic step that Dan Kleppner, director of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, said, "This is not a smoking gun for superfluidity. This is a canon."

For several years, research groups around the world have been studying cold gases of so-called fermionic atoms with the ultimate goal of finding new forms of superfluidity. A superfluid gas can flow without resistance. It can be clearly distinguished from a normal gas when it is rotated. A normal gas rotates like an ordinary object, but a superfluid can only rotate when it forms vortices similar to mini-tornadoes. This gives a rotating superfluid the appearance of Swiss cheese, where the holes are the cores of the mini-tornadoes. "When we saw the first picture of the vortices appear on the computer screen, it was simply breathtaking," said graduate student Martin Zwierlein in recalling the evening of April 13, when the team first saw the superfluid gas. For almost a year, the team had been working on making magnetic fields and laser beams very round so the gas could be set in rotation. "It was like sanding the bumps off of a wheel to make it perfectly round," Zwierlein explained.

"In superfluids, as well as in superconductors, particles move in lockstep. They form one big quantum-mechanical wave," explained Ketterle. Such a movement allows superconductors to carry electrical currents without resistance.

The MIT team was able to view these superfluid vortices at extremely cold temperatures, when the fermionic gas was cooled to about 50 billionths of a degree Kelvin, very close to absolute zero (-273 degrees C or -459 degrees F). "It may sound strange to call superfluidity at 50 nanokelvin high-temperature superfluidity, but what matters is the temperature normalized by the density of the particles," Ketterle said. "We have now achieved by far the highest temperature ever." Scaled up to the density of electrons in a metal, the superfluid transition temperature in atomic gases would be higher than room temperature....>

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-06/miot-mpc062105.php

[stepnw1f]

1. Very Cool!

Are their pics?

[R3dD0g]

3. Here

http://cua.mit.edu/ketterle_group/experimental_setup/BEC_I/image_gallery.html

[MadisonProgressive]

2. I guess I have to take their word for it!

:wtf: :freak:

[iconoclastic cat]

4. So, what exactly could you do with this stuff?

[Tesha]

5. Use it to make Ice-9. (NT)

[aeolian]

6. LOL! not quite. :)

No, this stuff is good for studying physical law. Right now, the existence of superfluids confirms some theories about low-energy physics. And studying them will teach us more about the details.

It's kind of like the LASER when it was first invented. "What the hell would anyone ever use a coherent beam of light for? It's just a research tool." Well, now there's a laser in every CD and DVD player on earth, and that's just for starters.

[Q3JR4]

7. I work with a professor

here at the university I attend that works on theoretical models for low temperature BEC vortex material. His last graduate assistant created java programs based on those calculations.

The interesting thing about this is that a group of people came up with a theoretical model that described the way electrons interact with each other and other particles in nature. They took the calculations to their logical conclusions and those calculations showed that if you put objects with integer spin (bosons) into a chamber and cool to a really cold temperature, their wave functions would overlap and the resulting material would behave as if it were one material.

A few years later, scientists discovered how to cool with lasers and they actually created Bose-Einstein Condensates in the laboratory. Then they found that if you spin these creations, vortices form that contain no material and the result looks like mater.

Now it seems the next step has been achieved, and they're able to create BEC material at higher temperatures.

What will they think of next?

[aeolian]

8. A unified field theory would be nice, for starters.

:headbang: